Recently I gathered feedback from several experts within the web industry and asked them to give me their top 10 favorite web companies to work for. There is no criteria here as to who does and who does not qualify. They can be sole proprietorships or large multi-national corporations. They can be an army of freelancers working remotely from their homes or bona fide employees under the same roof with benefits and perhaps stock options. With that said, here are the results:
- 37signals
- Adaptive Path
- Ludicorp
- Amazon.com
- Second Story
- Yahoo!
- Happy Cog Studios
- frog design & Six Apart (a tie)
- Cuban Council
Also please note that I myself had no vote in this matter, I simply tallied the results. There were several great companies that came close but didn’t make it into the top ten list. There were also several companies that have very low total revenue but were ranked much higher than companies with significantly larger annual revenue. That said the playing field here was very broad and not specifically level. Does popularity trump profit? Do smaller groups of freelancers offer more perceived value than established companies with a solid core group of employees? What are the metrics for success in a web company? Some food for thought there. As always, I’d love to hear the names of companies you think are great web companies to work for. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments section for this post.